While contact lenses and eyeglasses can help improve your visual clarity, they don’t do much to improve the efficiency and the function of your visual system. This is where vision therapy thrives.
Through a variety of exercises, vision therapy improves your visual performance and strengthens your visual skills.
Are you interested in vision therapy? Please, contact our team to see if our program is right for you!
Vision therapy is similar to physical therapy but focuses on your eyes, eye muscles, brain, and entire visual system. Vision therapy is prescribed by a behavioral optometrist and is administered by trained vision therapists.
During a vision therapy session, you will perform a variety of tailored exercises that train your visual system to work more efficiently. These exercises are customized based on the patient’s individual diagnoses, their age, and their ability level. The therapy sessions are administered one-on-one to ensure the patients that they’re receiving the highest quality care and attention we provide.
Anybody at any age can benefit from vision therapy. Children benefit from vision therapy to improve their academic performance at school. Adults benefit from vision therapy to improve their performance at work, reading, driving, or while playing sports.
Our vision therapy programs are customized and tailored specifically to the individual, so the length of programs may vary from person to person.
Some skills improved by vision therapy can include:
In a vision therapy session, some of the tools we may use include:
For some, vision therapy can be a difficult concept to grasp. The simplest way to differentiate visual acuity and visual skill is to break them down into their definitions:
It is very common for a person to have excellent eyesight (20/20 visual acuity) but still have poor visual function. Many patients and parents are told that they or their child’s eyes are “normal” because they have 20/20 eyesight. But the function of vision does not end with an assessment of eyesight. If visual performance or visual function is not specifically measured, then it is not a complete assessment of a patient’s visual system.
At Vision Care Center, our optometrists are known as behavioral optometrists meaning that they have received specialized training and education in the areas that focus on the function and performance of vision. All areas of the visual system will be measured in order to determine if there are any lacking visual function areas that are impairing one’s performance.
Optometric vision therapy can help train you in these visual skills in order to improve your visual performance. Eyeglasses and contact lenses aren’t always the answer to improve one’s vision. In the cases of these visual function problems, vision therapy might be the best option. The goal is to improve your visual comfort so you can comfortably and efficiently rely on your eyes for school, work, sports and more.
Vision therapy can help manage problems related to how patients process information. In some cases, conditions like ADHD and dyslexia can be misdiagnosed as a learning, developmental, or behavioral problem, when they are actually visual problems.
By focusing on the underlying issue with vision, our team can manage, and possibly correct, learning-related symptoms:
By improving visual skills such as eye-tracking and eye-hand coordination, you improve how you learn and process information.
Strabismus and amblyopia are common eye conditions that could affect or harm the quality of a patient’s vision. In some cases, these eye conditions can occur in patients as young as 1 to 3 years old.
Vision therapy can provide meaningful exercises that help correct these conditions.
Binocular coordination refers to how well the two eyes work together. If coordination is deficient, it will affect your depth perception and ability to read, write, play sports, and drive a car.
Symptoms like eye strain, headaches, and blurred vision are all common indicators of stress on your vision. Vision therapy can help identify where these stresses so you can enjoy comfortable vision.
Brain injuries and neurological issues caused by concussions, nerve palsy, and strokes can affect a variety of visual skills. Binocular Vision Dysfunction therapy is a series of different vision exercises designed to help manage and mitigate the effect neurological damage has on your vision.
Sports demand quite a bit from your vision, and visual deficiencies in eye-hand coordination, eye tracking, and focusing can lead to a less-than-stellar performance on the playing field. Vision therapy, specifically sport vision enhancement therapy, can help improve these skills so you can confidently rely on your vision and keep your eyes on the ball.
Aidan struggled in school with reading from the board and tasks like copying plus general reading. He had no depth perception at all, which made playing baseball very difficult. After working with Sam all of this changed.
At the end of the school year his grades reflected the work put forth in VT–all A’s and B’s! Baseball has been much easier this season and he has depth perception for the first time ever! The best part is he can now tell when his eye is “checked out” and is able to bring it back in to working order. Working with Sam and team has been wonderful and his gains have definitely helped his self confidence!
With the increased course-load of my first semester of college, I started to notice almost constant eye fatigue.
Throughout the vision therapy process, I have been able to notice very gradual improvement of my “eye endurance.”
As this second semester progressed, staying awake for studying, homework, and reading became easier.
Vision therapy also made me realize that my gradual decrease in reading for fun was likely linked to the eye fatigue I was experiencing.
Now I’m very excited to be able to actually enjoy reading again.
Optometric vision therapy can help you strengthen your visual skills. Do you think vision therapy is right for you? Call our VT department at 670-2020 ext. 017 to learn more and book an appointment today!
Find us just south of the Sheridan & Glen intersection, on the same side of the road as Marco’s Pizza and across the street from Walgreens.
Find us just south of the Sheridan & Glen intersection, on the same side of the road as Marco’s Pizza and across the street from Walgreens.
You can find our office on North Cummings Lane, right next door to Rock Valley Physical Therapy. We offer plenty of parking in front of our clinic with accessible parking stalls.
Closed for lunch 12-1pm
You can find our office on North Cummings Lane, right next door to Rock Valley Physical Therapy. We offer plenty of parking in front of our clinic with accessible parking stalls.
Closed for lunch 12-1pm
Peoria
Washington
